A fur test on Suzanne the Blender Monkey 🐵

This was made in the 3D program Blender.

From Blender 3.5 onwards a new feature called Quick Fur was added, and getting it to work and look accurate/aesthetically pleasing was a challenge.

It required learning about vertex groups, weight painting vertices, the new hair grooming system, how the various modifiers for the Quick Fur geometry nodes groups affect the overall application of hairs, and resolving issues that cropped up like unexpected bald patches (adding more guide hairs in the hair sculpt mode, and rearranging them for a more evenly controlled distribution).

The render was created using the Cycles engine, with the dollycam addon. The camera was set at 90mm focal length, f-stop 8.0.

I think this choice of focal length and aperture resulted in a good blur on the background while not obscuring its interesting details.

The background was created via Bing AI Image generator with the prompt "a 3d render of a dense jungle" - one of the first results was what I had in mind so I used it imported as a plane (activated native addon) in Blender.

I curved the plane of the image within Blender to attempt to cause differential blurring, so the parts of the image closer to the periphery (and with objects in the foreground) might have sharper focus than the distant center. Still, the effect is not noticeable due to too little bend in the geometry of the plane and too high an f-stop.

Cutting out the various parts of the image, inpainting the missing details through AI image generation in Photoshop, and importing them as planes in separate layers would be a sensible approach to resolving this problem in the future and producing a better result.

The skin material and eyes on the Monkey have light subsurface scattering, which I think works effectively here, giving the skin a soft plastic doll appearance which I think is appropriate for this style of work.

Lastly, the lighting, exposure, and curves were adjusted in Blender to produce an image with a better dynamic range and contrast, however I could not get the image brightness intended so I corrected it in Photoshop for the final image.

@southernshotty thank you for your tutorials!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyb4MCDiQQY

His video on Quick Fur was the one I referred to most during this process.